Monrovia – The Government of Liberia has re-indicted Milton Weeks, former Governor of the Central Bank of Liberia, along with four former board members of the bank. The indictment was served on Weeks moments after state prosecutors had dropped previous charges against him on Monday, June 8.
The second indictment accuses the former governor and five former officials of allegedly ordering the minting of an excess of two million Liberian Dollars printed by Crane Currency of Sweden and brought in the country.
Those that have been indicted alongside Weeks are former board members David Farhat, Melissa Emeh, Elisie Dossen Badio, Kollie Tamba, Dorbor Hagba, Former Director of Finance, Richard Walker, former Director for Banking and Joseph Dennis, Director for Internal Audit.
The indictment accuses the defendants of Theft of Property, Economic Sabotage, Fraud on the Internal Revenue of Liberia, Misuse of Public Money, Property or Record, and Illegal Disbursement of Public Money, Criminal Conspiracy and Facilitation.
According to the indictment, “at a material time divers in 2017 either out of mischief or deception the Defendants allegedly ordered the destruction or discarding of some of the legacy banknotes from the vault of the CBL to remove them from circulation but the whole exercise turned out to be a complete charade only invented as a form of trick and artifice by Co-defendant Milton Weeks and the Board of Governors to mislead the public”.
The indictment added that the CBL Board of Directors and others were in “flagrant disregard” to the Constitutional authority vested in the Legislature under Article (34) (d) to cause the printing of banknotes and minting of coins had already mandated Co-defendant Milton Weeks to enter into a contract on June 12, 2017 with Crane Currency to print L$10,000,000,000 Liberian dollars banknotes at the cost of US$10, 121, 689.20 before receiving the July 2017 communication.
Earlier on Monday, Criminal Court Judge Yamie Quiqui Gbeisay had dropped criminal charges against Weeks before the new indictement was served on him.
Judge Gbeisay’s decision to drop the charges against the former CBL governor was based on government lawyers’ application filed to the court to nullle prosequi (avoid prosecution) the case.
Charles Sirleaf, son of former president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, was also declared free by the court in April after the government opted to drop charges against him.
Sileaf, Weeks and five others were indicted in 2019 following a United States funded investigation into the reportedly missing L$16 billion.
While Sirleaf, who was the deputy CBL Governor for operations at the CBL is now a free man, Weeks will now have to go through a legal battle against the government to clear his name.